


lockjaw

by nascar



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Dragons, France - Freeform, Kleptomania, M/M, Magical Realism, Making Out, which is it??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 19:20:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19362808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nascar/pseuds/nascar
Summary: Jeno doesn’t seem interested in breaking Donghyuck at all though, his hands are soft and smooth over where Donghyuck wants him most, places that he’s vulnerable, belly up. He’s trusting when he has Donghyuck by the hair in some standard-issue librarian closet, and tender when he admits he never learned how to use the Dewey decimal system. Jeno Lee is so dumb and has a mouth like a dog and a mouth like for kissing.





	lockjaw

**Author's Note:**

> [hit it girls](http://vm.tiktok.com/RNNfj1) (insp from what the dragon said: a love story by catherynne m valente)

 

Donghyuck has spent a total of 76 hours in the Interuniversity Library of Montpellier, France. He’s spent sixty of those hours stealing pages out of books and sticking them into his socks and another 16 sleeping in the German History section. 

 

He’s only spent ten minutes in the library looking for someone to kiss though. It’s a pressing matter.

 

There’s a boy at the counter, with a head like a saint, pretty like a peach. He wears a lanyard that reads JENO LEE in big blocky handwritten letters, and these glasses that nearly take up half his face.

 

“You keep staplers and shit back here?” Donghyuck asks, leaning right up against the century old computer that  _ Jeno _ clacks away at mindlessly. 

 

Jeno looks up at him from where he was nuzzled in an xx large cashmere sweater that looks like it tastes how cotton cream does. “Staplers? Yeah.”

 

Donghyuck nods, not so indiscreetly looking over the counter. Twisting his mouth up into a concentrated pout. “Cool.” 

 

Jeno Lee pauses, unsure. “Do you? Want to see them?” Donghyuck steps on his own shoe lace and then says yes. That’s how he ends up in Jeno’s mouth at the back of the reception counter, crinkled melvins clinging to his shirt and Jeno clinging to his jaw. 

 

The next time he comes into the library he skips over Jeno completely and finds himself tucked into a section of shelves dedicated to the American Revolution and while he’s tucking pages of the boston tea party he thinks, America never revolted, they became some other kind of revolting. A different meaning. 

 

With hands like that, Jeno is good at making Donghyuck want things. 

 

Not on topic. 

 

Jeno’s backpack has all these cute cat pins on it that Donghyuck noticed when he was wrapping his legs around Jeno’s waist, sliding his hands into his hair. You trust boys who trust cats, they can wait you out. 

 

Another thing? You never trust anyone bigger than you. Which is probably why Donghyuck is pretending that he hadn’t kissed the receptionist boy within an inch of his life against a poster of Ernest Hemingway. 

 

Donghyuck bites his straw and stuffs a page on Bacon’s Rebellion into his sock. 

  
  


Donghyuck also doesn’t know how to do anything that he’s supposed to so that’s how he finds himself at the help desk again, arms crushed awkwardly to his sides while Jeno watches him, just, watches him, a penny’s length away from pressing the softest kiss to the tip of Donghyuck’s nose.

 

“Does your dad not live with you?” Jeno asks.

 

“No he died.”

 

“Ah, shit. For real?” 

 

Seriously, “No. But I wish he did.” 

 

If Jeno finds that sad he doesn’t say anything, instead he presses that kiss to the tip of Donghyuck’s nose, and it’s the softest. 

  
  


It’s a dragon thing, hoarding. Donghyuck’s mother calls it collecting. It’s more elegant on the tongue, justifiable. It’s stealing. Filling a void, building whole cities in his belly with all the golds and riches he can find. New earth is so bland though, already sifted through and washed out. Nothing shines like he likes unless it’s cat boy’s eyes and tongue. He can’t steal those though, so words will do. 

 

Pages of them, everything that tastes nice. Words like,  _ My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.  _ Jack Kerouac. He collects other words too, words that shock and tingle. Words like cunt, words like bastard. Cunt cunt cunt. He stuffs them down in his socks and coat pockets until he’s holding all he can and still perpetually half full. 

 

If the sun rose in a different direction he could be what he really is. 28 meters of golden crested scales and wings that haunt like sunsick ghosts, collect until a body like his can be full, really full. Teeth that could rip Lee Jeno into pieces. 

 

But the time of Dragons is over and he shares his body with the flail and flimsy of a too tight, smallstuck human dna host. It’s his, born into, but it’s stiff at the joints and too small, so small. In this world Lee Jeno could blow him out like a light. And Donghyuck’s small, crooked fingers, would break trying to fight it. 

 

Jeno doesn’t seem interested in breaking Donghyuck at all though, his hands are soft and smooth over where Donghyuck wants him most, places that he’s vulnerable, belly up. He’s trusting when he has Donghyuck by the hair in some standard-issue librarian closet, and tender when he admits he never learned how to use the Dewey decimal system. Jeno Lee is so dumb and has a mouth like a dog and a mouth like for kissing. 

 

He laces up Donghyuck’s bloodstained Reeboks when Donghyuck makes to leave the library closet for the fifth time. “Careful out there,” He tells him, then says something in french and kisses his thumb before pressing it to the place between Donghyuck’s nose and lip. 

 

Lee Jeno won’t crush his bones or steal his words, but he sure is fucking Donghyuck up right where he bleeds. 

  
  


“You don’t eat enough,” Donghyuck’s mom tells him one night, fitting her palm to the hollow of his cheek. She’s five feet of burning paper and glossy hair that Donghyuck coughs on. “Have you been seeing a boy?” Donghyuck nods. “Is he taller than you?” Donghyuck also nods here. 

 

“Do not kiss boys like that on the mouth.”

 

Too late. Donghyuck has kissed Lee Jeno a lot of places. 

  
  


Donghyuck tacks his stolen words up until he can't see the beige of the walls bleed through the cracks. Before, they were mostly about space, and voids. Now there’s Emily Dickenson, Hughes, fucking Ginsberg. On Tuesdays he skates down by the metro and tastes the poem  _ America _ on his tongue like he’s burning it. Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.  _ Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.  _

 

He falls hard and breaks the skin of his knee, blood soaks into his socks and he holds that there instead of papers. Dragon’s blood is the real stuff, premium type, Chanel no. 5. 

 

Jeno will probably kiss it better anyways. 

  
  


The thing about making out with the library receptionist on some kind of baseless lie is that, for all parties the affair is mostly misleading, unlabeled and confusing. There’s not a word for that one. For making out with the library receptionist. It’s not friends with benefits, they aren’t friends. 

 

Donghyuck decides to start there, friends. Not quite sure how to do that, he lets Jeno do that part. 

 

“You wanna, ah,” Donghyuck bites him, “Come to this art exhibit?” 

 

Donghyuck says yes like he’s breathing it and kisses Jeno right on the teeth. 

  
  


The art show is mostly about Basquiat, not all art by Basquiat but it’s about him. Jeno doesn’t paint but his friend does. His name is Renjun and he’s got Dragon Eyes like Donghyuck’s mom does. They stare at each other for a long second before Jeno coughs and Renjun punches him in the shoulder. 

 

“You didn’t tell me you got a boyfriend.”

 

Jeno’s eyes fishbowl out and he has the face of a true comedian or a floundering fish. 

 

“I’m Donghyuck.” and Donghyuck shakes his hand, Renjun is smaller than him but he stands straight and shakes Donghyuck’s hand anyways. Contemporary. 

  
  


Renjun smokes weed, a lot of it. He also paints on the walls of his apartment and doesn’t care if he’ll get charged for it. He’s a little like Donghyuck, apart from the obvious. He collects, rings. Rich golden bands, crested diamond, flecked silver roping around tender metal, he hoards. He hates coffee unlike his boyfriend. 

 

Jaemin is human but he looks at Donghyuck like he knows what  _ he  _ is. 

  
  


Jeno takes Donghyuck on a date. It’s the kind of place people like Donghyuck don’t go to. Not broke film students, but the other half. The magic half. An aquarium. Jeno is studying marine biology. He hates aquariums. 

 

“Look how lonely they are in there,” He properly pouts, face all turned blue from the lighting. He has one hand in Donghyuck’s and his other pauses inches from the glass. “They should be free.” 

 

Donghyuck stares at himself in the reflection of the glass and hums. “Yeah.” Then he tugs on Jeno’s hand to get his attention. “Why do you come here if seeing them locked up makes you sad?” 

 

A low moan comes from the whale in the glass and Jeno’s eyes soften. “Because it makes me think about how I can free them, I’m going to tear down all these awful places one day.” 

 

Donghyuck thinks about that long and hard for the rest of the day. When Jeno’s face is scrunched in concentration reading a menu, and when he holds Donghyuck closer on the sidewalk and when he smiles at a school of fish. He thinks about it when they’re all tangled up in each other in Jeno’s car and Jeno’s eyes turn this dark scary blue color. He thinks about it because it makes sense this way and Jeno Lee was never slipshod human skin or so-so library boy. Magic blood or not, Donghyuck still kisses him slick and soft when he’s dropped off at home and presses a thumb into his collarbone as a good luck charm. 

 

Donghyuck is collecting new things these days, sweet things. 

**Author's Note:**

> to the tune of lalala by bbno$
> 
> [twt](https://twitter.com/crushcults) \+ [cc](https://curiouscat.me/crushcults)


End file.
